Businessweek Archives

Phantom GDP

The story I promised you is here. To summarize, it looks like the official statistics have been miscounting the impact of offshoring. Unless I’m crazy, cost gains and productivity improvements in the global supply chain are being credited to the U.S. economy—in effect, creating “phantom GDP.” In reality, both domestic GDP and domestic productivity have been growing slower than the official statistics show, and manufacturing is in much worse shape.